Books by Arturo Longoria

Friday, July 8, 2016

BECOMING NOCTURNAL

As I write this I’m surrounded by my three blue heelers.It’s 106 degrees outside with a heat index at
111 degrees.I’ll let my dogs out in the
evening when I also go to my little shop adjacent to the barn.I’ll work into the early morning hours as
it’s the only time when temps are tolerable.Note: It was still 86 degrees at 2AM last night.My songbirds and quail have to eat during the
heat of the day but I’m doing what I can to provide them with water and grain.I keep the woods close all around my cabin to
give cover for the birds and because the trees provide abundant shade.It’s strange how people in the area have
cleared almost every inch of foliage around them.No shade, no wildlife, no beauty.By the way, this past winter never arrived. But it seems that, for the most part, any sort
of winter in Deep South Texas has been nearly non-existent for the past twenty years
at least.I figure there’ll be brownouts
or even blackouts this summer as temperatures spike into dangerous levels
across the country.We already know that
many places, both here and around the world, are suffering from severe droughts
and that sea levels are rising. Of
course, in this country there’s a massive attempt to discredit any empirically derived
evidence to suggest that these negative trends are attributable to human behavior.This rampant denialism is being funded by the polluting industries that see
logic, reason and science as a threat to their power and wealth.But what’s interesting is to witness how
people with no vested interest in living in heat-plagued regions, or who are
suffering from droughts and crop failures, or who have been forced to
experience the ill-effects of significant levels of air and water pollution are
so quick to side with the corporatists who could not care less about the masses
and who are themselves already preparing their safe-houses in far-off countries
where they believe they’ll be safe when everything falls apart.In the meanwhile the easily duped will be forced
to melt away in inhospitable lands void of water, and suffering what will be
akin to a perpetual blast furnace.It
wasn’t until I started reading about the phenomenon of denialism that I discovered there is a deep psychological (some
might suggest, psychiatric) reason for people to bury their heads in the sand
and ignore overwhelming data.

From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia

In the psychology of human
behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality,
as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is
an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of an
historical experience or event, by the person refusing to accept an empirically verifiable
reality. In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and
concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in
favor of radical and controversial ideas.[3] The terms Holocaust denialism and AIDS
denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality
of the subject matters, and the term climate change denialist is
applied to people who argue against the scientific consensus that
the global warming of planet Earth is a real
and occurring event primarily caused by human activity. The forms of
denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming
evidence and the generation of political controversy with attempts to deny the
existence of consensus. The motivations and causes of denialism include
religion and self-interest (economic, political, financial) and defense mechanisms meant to protect the
psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas.

I talked to someone this past week that got quite upset and
then almost panicky when I mentioned that we all need to adopt responsible behaviors
in regards to protecting the land. I
kept hearing an insistence that none of this is real; and there seemed a
constant reliance on the disinformation provided by radio spin-doctors, partisan
news networks, and various other corporate and plutocratic manipulators. Indeed,
it seems that brainwashing is an easy thing to accomplish when tethered to
people’s anxieties and phobias. After
that conversation it occurred to me that I’d heard a fascinating reference to
this kind of behavior back in the days when I read extensively in subjects
related to biblical history, philosophy, the Axial Age, and other topics
related to pivotal events in ancient times.
The attribution comes partly from a New Testament text in the book of 2nd
Timothy. Biblical scholars are at odds
as to who wrote the books of Timothy but it is commonly acknowledged that six
of the epistles credited to Paul (formerly known as Saul) are pseudo-epigraphical,
that is to say, forgeries. I’m not here
to argue the issue, so please debate that subject on other forums. Regardless, the specific text I am referring
to is 2nd Timothy 4:3 that says: “For a time is coming when people
will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will
look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to
hear.”—New Living Translation. Said another way from the New American Standard Bible, “For a time
will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their
ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to
their own desires.” Amazing, that fellow
was talking about denialism way back
then. On another note, let’s not forget
the politicians and journalists who don’t even know the difference between climate and weather. Meanwhile wild
fires rage in the Western US and are arriving at earlier dates each year. Simultaneously, rising temperatures continue
depleting reservoirs, destroying crops, contributing to new dust bowls,
threatening electrical grids, and in some areas have driven people, like me, to
become nocturnal.

You often hear politicians and corporatists complain about
“too much regulation.” I accept that reason
and logic are in short supply these days (after all, the idea is to keep the
people avariciously obese and logically anorexic) but the truth is that regulation is already running its
course. As much as our bought-and-paid-for
politicians want to fantasize otherwise, the world has already initiated its
own regulatory protocol. And chasing all
the unsound doctrines in the world won’t stop the fact that nature will eventually
sort things out. It would be a lot better if people used
common sense and divested themselves from their greed and instead began
programs to lessen the effects of our ever increasing global temperatures. Unfortunately, that seems more and more
unlikely. Either way, it really doesn’t
matter because as for as the world sees things, regulation is coming. We’ll see droughts that will rival every
drought ever experienced; massive crop failures; plummeting water supplies; poisoned
ground water (does the word fracking ring
a bell?); deadly air quality; tropical diseases continuing to drift northward; and “fires will roam the earth.” So for now I am nocturnal though in time not
even that will work. Just imagine living
on a super-heated earth with no means towards air conditioning and without
enough water to go around and the air over you either choked with smoke or
filled with industrial toxins that won’t go away. Yesterday, I had my yearly eye exam and my ophthalmologist
complained that this year saw some of the worst smoke pollution from
agricultural fires in southern Mexico and Central America. That smoke is still drifting as far north as Oklahoma
and Missouri. The 2.5 micron counts have
reached dangerous levels in some regions.
I have no doubt that as our global population shoots higher and higher
and industrial pollution rises we will see even greater smoke events. Not even the doomsday-loving preppers will be
able to get past that scenario. But
there you have it: Cancer of any sort eventually kills its host if
unregulated. Why would anyone ever think
that the same principle doesn’t apply to a system of economics and government
that pushes unregulated growth with its accompanying pollution and endless
population expansion and interminable greed and consumption?